Choosing Web Keywords
Almost every business wants to come up first on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. An entire industry has built up over the last 5 years that focuses on nothing but Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short.
The primary search engines I mentioned all have their own rules for making companies first or last in search results. They do not publish these rules (also called algorithms), but they do change them regularly in an attempt to provide you with improved results. That is what drives the SEO industry – the knowledge of what these search engines are doing and how to exploit them to their client’s advantage. But what you don’t usually hear is how simple SEO for the small business can actually be; it just takes some legwork.
First, you have to know what words you want to “own” when people are trying to find your website. A word to own doesn’t have to be a single word. It can be a short phrase, preferably no longer than three words. Please do not expect to own generic words like “doctor” or “manufacturer.” There are literally billions of websites competing for those words. Without a multi-million dollar budget, you won’t have much success for generic words.
When coming up with your keywords, you need to think of what your customer might type in to find you. For instance, if I wanted to find a pet store in Little Rock, I might type in “pet store little rock.” If that doesn’t produce good results, I might narrow it down to “fish aquarium pets little rock.” You have to learn to think like your customers who are searching for your services.
If you need a little help in researching good keywords, there is a good (and free!) tool provided by Overture (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) that will tell you words similar to yours that people have searched for at Yahoo and how many searches were done with those words. This can help you narrow down your words.
Finally, if you’ve had a website running for a little while, you should be able to find out what words people are entering in search engines to find you. Your keywords should be showing up in your website visitor statistics. If your keywords are not showing up, you need to ask yourself why not. We’ll explore the possible reasons in our next issue.
